Why you are not getting interviews
You applied. You heard nothing. Your resume looked fine to you. That combination is common enough to be the default experience, and the reason is usually not that you were unqualified for the roles you applied to.
The ten seconds that decide it
A person opens your resume and spends somewhere around ten seconds on it before sorting it into one of two piles. That first pass is not the decision to hire you, and it is not the decision to interview you either. It decides something narrower and more final: whether you stay in consideration at all.
What makes it matter so much is that it works in only one direction. A yes buys you a proper read, thirty seconds or a minute, where your detail actually gets considered. A no ends it there, and nothing further down the page is ever reached. You do not get a second look to make up for a weak first one.
Most resumes bury the answer. The strongest material is present, it is just placed where nobody reading at that speed will find it. That is a structural problem, and structural problems are the fixable kind.
What to check first
Your strongest work is not what leads
Most resumes are ordered by chronology and nothing else, so the best thing someone has done sits below a list of duties from a role they held four years ago. A reader who gives you ten seconds forms their impression long before reaching it.
Responsibilities where results should be
A bullet that starts with "responsible for" describes the job, not you. Anyone who has held that title was responsible for the same things. What a hiring manager is buying is what you did differently and what it produced: the thing you built, fixed or changed, and the number that shows the difference it made.
Nothing is quantified
Numbers are how a reader calibrates scale in a hurry. Team size, budget, users, volume, percentage moved. Without at least a few, every claim reads the same weight and none of it lands.
The document does not convert cleanly
Multi column layouts, text inside images and inconsistent date formats all survive the eye but come apart when the file is converted into a searchable record. If the structure does not survive being stripped to plain text, parts of your history may not be searchable at all.
The summary says nothing specific
A wall of adjectives at the top costs you the most valuable space on the page. It is the first thing read and the easiest thing to make concrete.
What the format does about it
The builder is not a blank page with styling options. It is one format, refined over fifteen years of IT delivery work, and the whole point of it is the order things go in.
A Professional Summary of your experience and highlights sits directly under your name, at the top of the first page, written as three to five quantified bullets rather than a paragraph of adjectives. Experience follows in reverse chronological order, then education. Four sections, single column, no tables and no text boxes, so the structure survives being converted into a searchable record.
That order is what makes ten seconds enough. The reader does not have to go looking for your strongest work, because it is the first thing on the page.
About application volume
Sending more applications is the usual response, and it is the wrong lever to pull first. If the resume is not landing, a hundred more sends produce a hundred more silences and take weeks doing it. Fixing what a reader sees in the first ten seconds changes the return on every application after it, including the ones you already sent and would send again.
Check yours in about a minute
The free scan reads your resume the way a hiring team's software would, then shows you what a person catches in the first ten seconds. You get a Readiness Score out of 100 and the specific issues, item by item. It shows you what is wrong. The fixing happens in the builder, with you driving.
No signup needed for the scan. Drop a .docx, .pdf, or .txt.